Category Archives: Pro Cyclist Training

Usually my main interest in posting on my site is to relay ideas about training, nutrition, or lifestyle issues that affect endurance athletes, usually cyclists, triathletes, and runners. Every once in a while it seems appropriate to put in a word or two about what I’ve been up to and maybe any new insights that brings me with respect to the life of an endurance athlete. Feel free to skim and read whatever interests you. I never know what people will find interesting in my writing, but you can always shoot me an email and ask (nate@englishendurance.com).

China

Yes, about a month ago, I went with my team to China for a few late season races. 6 of us from the team went, and we spent 10 days doing a stage race with all short, flat, sprint stages and then did a one day race before coming back home. It was interesting, and pretty cool to go to China since I’ve never been there. The racing was, quite frankly, terrible for me as a rider. With no mountains, no long stages, no time-trials, and no truly interesting features to the race except for the blistering paces on the flats, there wasn’t much for me and all of my slow twitch muscles to do but hang in and try to take some wind for my teammates when appropriate.

Ironically, after Utah, I figured my season was over because with my injuries (a few fractured vertebrae, abrasions, and sprained shoulder) I wasn’t fit to ride the inaugural Tour of Alberta with my team. Given an early start to my off season, I decided to experiment a bit with my diet and training and had been pleased to drop a few pounds below my normal racing weight (which is the same as my off-season weight). Losing 3-4 pounds is great for winning the Diablo Challenge mass-start hill-climb charity ride, which was fun, but not so great if you want a ton of power for races on flat ground that average 29-30 mph most of the time.

Still, I think most of my teammates are in somewhat the same state of mind of feeling fortunate to have gotten through the races unscathed by any serious illness or injury and having had the pleasure of another adventure only made possible by the sport we love.

Cycling and New Beginnings

At the end of this season, it became clear to us athletes and those that follow the sport that job prospects for cyclists were not at their high-point, to say the least. Rather, domestically and abroad several teams were folding, budgets were tight, and there was again an abundance of talent available with not so many positions around for them to fill. As much as I’ve enjoyed racing for these last several years, I’ve enjoyed most of all the opportunity to progress as an athlete, to increase my fitness and capabilities, and to increase my skills and knowledge of the sport and how to participate in it. To that end, each year has provided me good stimulation physically and mentally as I’ve tried to better myself physically and mentally as a cyclist.

As the off-season was setting in and teams were making their offers, I was given a few good opportunities to continue racing at the professional level, but only at a similar level of compensation to what I’ve had the last few years. This wasn’t really what I was looking for, and quite frankly is less than I think an athlete of my abilities is worth. But, in the current financial climate of the sport, it’s hard to look on any legitimate offer too poorly. Still, I’ve spent the last 6 years or so seeing how far I can develop as a cyclist while also committing myself to full-time work off-the-bike, and now also engaging in a steady flow of coaching work. If I were afforded a proper opportunity to forego a full-time job in order to pursue cycling full-time, then I might take that opportunity, because I’m certain that I would have more room to improve if I weren’t on such a tight budget with my time. But, nobody saw fit to give me such an opportunity.

To be sure, I’ve actually found that working full-time and trying to be successful athlete with only 15-20 hours a week to train to be quite challenging, interesting, and fun. I take great pleasure in knowing that I’ve won professional races, finished 5th in the US Pro TT, finished in the top 15 at the Tour of CA, and accomplished many of my goals with a full-time job and only averaging about 16-18 hours per week on the bike. I definitely think it has helped me to develop a skillset and knowledge base that helps me as a coach, because quite frankly, the training that a Pro Tour cyclist does and what is available to a 40 hour a week working person are not at all the same, nor should they be. So, with limited room for further improvement and other reasons, I decided that I would take the next step in my efforts to explore my athletic potential and to move to triathlon in the coming year.

I’ve long planned on moving to triathlon whenever I saw my cycling coming to a close, but needed to choose the most appropriate time. To speak plainly, there isn’t much money to be made in cycling by anyone except the cyclists who are regarded as being the most promising or most successful and are compensated accordingly. Unfortunately, this system is not always fair, but for better or for worse that seems to be the way life often is across different circles, so I try not to let it bother me much. Likewise, there is a lot of inherent risk in the sport and most people will come away unscathed except for a number of superficial scars on their hips, knees, and elbows, but there are some who don’t walk away from the sport so comfortably. Some break their necks! Ha! Like me. Luckily, in spite of having one or two fairly catastrophic falls myself, I’ve been able to avoid any real damage, and I’d certainly like to keep it that way. If I’m not getting paid and not being given a real opportunity to pursue the sport full-time, then why should I keep at it?! Well, because it’s my passion, like many other athletes, but the rational side of me says that it’s an all too silly activity to risk one’s neck, quite literally, without real room for substantial improvement.

Lastly, even though I’m “only” 29 going on 30 in a few months, there is the simple fact that every year that I’m cycling, I’m taking away from other things that I could be doing with my time, like triathlon, coaching, and who knows what else. Perhaps I’m too swayed by the mentality of our age and the desire to pursue different dreams, but I do want to see what triathlon is like while I’m still young and have a room to see if I’m any good at the sport, among other things.

So, yes, I’m “retiring” from pro cycling. I’m committed to a move to triathlon to see how well I can do at that sport, and have started training to that end. I’m also committed to coaching and trying to develop materials for athletes to try to help them pursue their passion of testing themselves physically, as I love to do so much.

Off-Season and Training

For all intents and purposes, my off-season started the day I crashed out of the Tour of Utah. With a few broken vertebrae and some silly neck-brace to help keep my head from rolling off, I took 2 weeks totally off of any kind of physical activity, then took 2 weeks of riding the trainer every other day, followed by a month of regaining my legs on the bike. Basically, all of my training has been foundational with a lot of volume, tempo, and threshold riding, plus some weight training, and increasing amounts of running.

As always, you can see all of my over-distance training on Strava where I share all of my bike rides, runs, and now even swims. For the most part, my aim right now is to rely on cycling for good aerobic conditioning and endurance while I slowly add in slightly increasing volumes of running and swimming to the extent that my body allows. Even though I used to be able to manage 50-80 miles/week on a regular basis when I weighed 140 lbs in college, it’s been some years on the bike and my legs aren’t ready for that pounding quite yet. Hopefully they will be soon, but I’m easing into it as slowly as my body seems to want. Always, whether riding or running or otherwise, one of my cardinal rules in training is to try to avoid injury. A missed training session here or there because you’re cautious is nothing compared to a missed month because of injury sustained while mindlessly pushing ahead. I always hope that I have an adequate feel for what my body needs and what it’s limits are so that I can follow that rule successfully. I have so far in my first career as a runner, and then as a cyclist, so hopefully I can keep the streak going.

Clearly, my efforts to train as a triathlete, both now and my plans for it in the long run, are based on the same general principles as any endurance sport, but because of the nature of the sport will demand very different training methods than I’ve previously employed as a cyclist. I have a variety of ideas about how I plan to pursue this new endeavor, but I’ll bring those up another time in another text. In the meantime, I’ll just say that I’ve been having fun working with a few triathletes on their training, and thinking and planning for my own metamorphosis into a multi-sport athlete myself.

A few people have asked me about strength training lately, what kind of program I employ, and what I generally recommend. Rather than repeating myself in a few emails with much of the same content, I thought I’d write up some ideas and put them on the site so that maybe a few other people might find some of my ideas useful.

I think that strength training, among other cross training activities, can be a great addition to any endurance athlete’s routine. Whether you do it just during the off season, periodically throughout the season, or every week of the year will depend on your goals, time availability, and interest or motivation to do so. By all means, if you enjoy going to the gym, doing it once or twice a week will definitely not hurt you as an athlete, and probably will help, potentially quite a bit.

Unless you’re pursuing mutually exclusive training goals it should help you to mix up your training. E.g. lifting weights moderately during the winter months as you’re building strength, endurance, and general aerobic conditioning will be great. Lifting heavy weights and putting on muscle mass while you’re trying to get better at climbing will certainly set you back in the long run, unless you’re losing a similar amount of body fat or increasing your power more than your body weight increases, both of which are not uncommon! Still, you can’t become a thick-muscled gym regular without eventually having an adverse affect on your power to weight ratio, which will hurt you climbing and accelerating where power to weight matters. It could still help you for things like time-trialing, though, because body weight doesn’t matter so much for long, steady efforts on flat ground so much as absolute power. Looking around at some of the best time trialists in cycling or the best cyclists in triathlon, and you’ll see that they’re almost always notably bigger than the average athlete in their sport.

For most people, including at least 3-4 months of gym work during the off season 2-3 times per week will be great. It will help with their long term improvement in their sport and will likely help with injury prevention. Personally, I try to get in 2-3 core workouts each week and 2 days of whole body or lower body strength training each week during the off-season. I encourage any of my athletes who show interest and have some equipment and time available to adapt a similar program of kind of 2-3 days per week of strength, core work, and/or other cross training.

In an ideal world, my routine and the one I recommend would be as follows:4-6 weeks of general conditioning: >10-20m of light aerobic activity (e.g. running, rowing, or cycling) to warm up 3-4 sets of 12-20 reps at a moderate, but challenging weights ideally, some light stretching and foam rolling afterwards

3-5 weeks of strength building: >10-20m of light aerobic activity to warm up 1 set of light weight, 1 set of moderate weight to further warm-up 3-5 sets of 4-8 reps at a heavy weight maybe 5-15m light aerobic activity to cool down some light stretching and foam rolling afterwards

maybe 2-4 weeks of power building: the same as the strength building routine, but focused on moderate to heavy weights lifted quickly, and even explosively, but always under control

3-5 weeks of strength endurance: >10-20m of light aerobic activity (e.g. running, rowing, or cycling) to warm up 4-6 sets of 12-20 reps at a moderate, but challenging weights or 3-4 sets of 16-30 at a moderate weight, that is challenging towards the end of each set ideally, some light stretching and foam rolling

Why do it this way? Finishing a season and then taking time off or easy from a few weeks up to a month or so, you probably don’t want to jump right back into strenuous training that will likely leave you very sore and limit your foundational sport specific training (i.e. foundational miles training on the road or trails, cycling or running). You should start out moderately, so that you’re training hard enough to get your body to adapt and get stronger, but not so hard that you risk injury, psychological burnout, or experience unnecessary soreness. This need for moderation will be all the more important if you stop strength training during the season, in which case, you may be starting a gym routine in October or November when you haven’t seen a gym since March.

After getting a foundation of general conditioning, you’ll no doubt be stronger all around than before, but still may be far from your maximum strength and power to weight ratio. You may, and probably should, want to take a month or two to work specifically on enhancing strength. Just like it sounds, we will want to be able to lift, push, or pull more weight than we have in the past. This doesn’t mean that you need to lift weights to failure, in fact you might not want to, because that’s one of the surest ways to induce hypertrophy (i.e. to grow more muscle mass). Doing efforts lifting a weight that’s very challenging, we’ll be training our nervous system to recruit more and more muscle fibers, hence gaining strength. This is great, because if we increase raw strength, every time we’re pushing with submaximal force, that will be a smaller proportion of our maximal strength, and will thereby generally feel easier. Regardless of anything else, if something feels easier, then it is easier for you as an athlete.

If you’re an athlete that requires burst of speed and power, then you’ll almost certainly want to include a phase oriented specifically around power (i.e. lots of strength and control, but engaged at a high speed).

For runners, research increasingly shows that strength training with a high-weight, low-rep routine will increase running speed, economy, and VO2, whereas lifting moderate weights at high-reps will not help as much or at all. Likewise for power movements like plyometric drills and power-oriented lifting (quick, controlled weight lifting) to work on strength and speed simultaneously. For cycling, strength and power are invaluable as well, but there is probably also a good value in strength-endurance work as well because that is a major source of fatigue in endurance cycling.

After having built up your maximal strength, if you’re a cyclist or triathlete, you can then try to build up your strength endurance. If you’re a runner, then I don’t think this is necessary, and continuing with a general maintenance routine will be good, but focusing specifically on strength endurance will use up energy and probably not improve your performance. As far as it goes, part of the beauty of the gears on a bike is that they allow you to push harder and go faster, but in pushing harder, it helps to be strong and to be able to maintain that level of strength for long periods. Hence, there is a need for good strength endurance in cycling. In running on the other hand, you’re basically always operating at the same general resistance level. That is, you adjust your cadence to match your speed and the terrain you’re running on and you’re always just pushing your body weight into the air with each stride, so even though resistance varies with speed and gradient, it is a much narrower range of resistance you’re pushing against. You just can’t push twice as hard to go twice as far when you’re running, but you definitely can while you’re on a bike.

What actual workout routine do you follow? Well, I’ll usually try to fit in these workouts whenever my schedule allows. Sometimes that means that I’ll fit in a 30-45m workout before work, or sometimes on my day off before going out for a long ride. Either way, I try to work it out so that it has minimal impact in my sport specific workouts when they require any intensity. General endurance and high-aerobic work (tempo and low-threshold) can usually be done just fine after strength training, but hard threshold, VO2, or anaerobic capacity workouts are pretty much out of the question immediately before or after a gym workout.

Anyway, I don’t claim to have the perfect routine or anything like that, but I find that it seems to work for me, and I think it should address a lot of the main muscle groups you’d want to strengthen… I’ll usually do the following exercises:

I will never do the upper-body exercises very hard, because I’m trying to avoid weakness in my upper body, not to build muscle. Usually 2-3 sets of a moderately easy weight for 15-20 reps seems good. I’ll usually do the upper body exercises in a circuit format, just cycling through different exercises in sequence with just enough rest to catch my breath and keep good form. That way I never get too much opportunity to work those muscles enough to grow much extra muscle, or any at all, for that matter. Still, after a few weeks or a month of just moderate lifting, I always get much stronger without adding an ounce of body mass, which indicates to me that my nervous system is recruiting more muscle to do the work I want, which is just what I want, not extra muscle mass.

After doing a few sets of upper body exercises, I find that I’m a little more warmed up than when I started, and feel comfortable getting to the legs, which I will work harder. I’ll often do 1-2 sets easy to warm up and then go at it for 3-4 sets. The leg exercises are usually done with about 1m rest between sets, and I’ll usually cycle through 2-4 exercises at a time to give alternating muscle groups rest between sets. I don’t go so quickly that it would qualify as circuit training. Most recently I’ve been doing calve raises, quad extensions, hamstring curls, some sort of ab exercise, and then repeat it. I will frequently do dumbbell squats and lunges as well, always keeping a sequence that doesn’t work out the same muscle group multiple times in a row so it gets a rest between sets.

Getting enough rest between sets is key for building strength. I already get plenty of aerobic, sport-specific work in outside the gym, so I don’t need to try to get any aerobic work inside the gym. The aerobic workout you’d get from doing circuit training will be so far beneath your capabilities as an endurance athlete that I would regard it as not worth your time, and because there would be inadequate recovery between exercises if you engage in circuit training, it will detract from the main purpose of gym work, getting stronger and more powerful. Still, as an athlete concerned with efficiency, I would point out that there is no reason to sit or stand around for 3, 4, or even 5 minutes between sets of a given exercise as you may see many people doing at most gyms. Try to get enough rest, but get back to work as soon as you feel that you’re ready (likely 1-1.5 minutes will do). Having adequate rest to work out hard, but not taking a lot of extra rest between exercises should also help encourage your body to produce more testosterone and growth hormone which will help with your adaptation to training, and can help improve body composition by burning fat and maybe growing muscle.

I’ll work out in the gym harder when I’m not doing hard bike workouts, and ease up a bit when I’m doing hard interval training or long threshold efforts and the like. Likewise, even when I’m working on strength or power, I’ll usually do just one workout each week focused on that goal, while maintaining one general conditioning workout the other day I do gym work.

Really, that’s about all I do, but it makes a big difference for me. Even though many of us may consider ourselves endurance athletes and don’t instinctively consider raw strength and power to be all that essential to our performance, it is certainly the case that for most athletes, gym work will greatly enhance their total training program.

Recently, I’ve been spending a good bit of my time reading and thinking about foundational training, how to optimize endurance training, and things related. There are various reasons for this recent interest, but among them is the relevance to most people’s training at this time of year… usually, the off-season is a time for moderate to heavy endurance training (relative to our fitness/competitive goals). In any case, what follows are some of my recent thoughts on the subject.

Boiled down, without any commentary:

Use power and HR to set upper and lower limits for most of your endurance workouts, but generally focus more on HR.

Use power to set most guidelines for higher intensity efforts and workouts, but pay some attention to HR and RPE.

Use both RPE and power for efforts and workouts above aerobic capacity/VO2 max intensities.

Should I use power, HR, or RPE to gauge my endurance workouts or training pace? What do each of those metrics have to offer me in evaluating my training?

Well, that’s tough. Power is the only way to actually measure work being done on a bike and the rate of work being done. Or, if you’re running, your pace is clearly the measure of how quickly you’re covering a given distance. In some sense, this is all that matters. Heart rate will tell us how challenging our workout is for our aerobic systems, which is clearly key. If we’re trying to enhance endurance, then we’re ultimately trying to enhance how much we can get out of each unit of aerobic effort. In some sense, we’re trying to squeeze the most out of each heartbeat. Then again, perceived exertion (rate of perceived exertion = RPE) increasingly appears to be the bottom line for measuring fatigue and effort relative to our current fitness or potential. If you’re fresh or tired, fed or fasted, hot or cold, etc. etc. your sensations of perceived exertion is directly tied to your ability to keep exercising. More and more scientists these days would go so far as to say that the feeling of fatigue is fatigue.

So what now? Power will tell me how much work I’m doing, but nothing about how hard that is for me at my current fitness level, nor will it tell me whether I’m getting fitter in any direct fashion. HR will tell me only how hard I’m working relative to my current aerobic fitness level, with some feedback from things like heat, dietary status, fatigue, etc. but won’t tell me anything about how that level is progressing or how I compare now to last month or last year. RPE will tell me the end result of my body’s internal integration of all of the factors that affect fatigue, including HR, but will include other things like dietary status, motivation, mental fatigue, etc. into those biological equations, and again, won’t tell me anything about actual work being done and fitness level without outside feedback.

After spending some time thinking about these ideas, reading what other people have to say, and recalling my experiences in my own training, I think it’s really ideal to pay attention to all three and use each of the three metrics to create guidelines or constraints for your training, and to use the relation of the three metrics to each other to gauge your progress. Namely, consider doing the following:

HR – Since HR is the best direct gauge of aerobic effort relative to your current fitness level, I would probably say that if you’re only going to pay attention to one thing during endurance oriented workouts, then I would say you should pay attention to HR. Create a HR range that you’ll strive for the duration of your endurance workouts, high enough that it’s actually a workout, but low enough that you can keep it in that range almost the whole time you’re out, with the exception of warm-up, possible harder efforts, and a cool-down.

Power (or running pace) – Create a range, again, so that the workout requires a lot of work, but easy enough that you can keep it going. Aim for a high-aerobic power output if you’re cycling, below your tempo pace but high enough that it’s going to tire you out over the 3, 4, or 5 hours that you’re out on your bike. Likewise for running, except that we can use pace very effectively as a substitute for power, usually going a little slower than your marathon race pace.

RPE – With both HR and power guidelines in place, pay attention to how easy or hard things feel. If it’s easy from start to finish, increase the HR and power you’re shooting for by a small margin, but if it’s difficult or impossible to finish your goal workouts in those HR and power ranges, then reduce your goal power and HR until you find a sweet spot that’s achievable but challenging.

With these ideas in mind, I’ve found that some of my best endurance training on the bike occurs when I aim to keep my HR in the 120-130 bpm range, power in the 250-300w range, and my effort steady but not hard. For me, it’s very difficult to have an average HR above 125-130 for a ride of any duration, but if I can keep my HR mostly in the 120s with occasional spikes above that on hills where I ride tempo/threshold type efforts, then I can complete a very productive endurance ride and not slow significantly at the end. If I ride much under that, then I know it wasn’t much of a workout or the workout was geared towards other goals, in which case my HR may or may not have been relevant. If I try to keep my HR above 130 for long periods of time, then unless I’m highly caffeinated, I know from experience that I can’t keep that average up for more than a few hours on a steady endurance ride, so there’s no point in blowing my effort in the first half of a 5 hour ride when it would be more productive to keep it steady most of the time. Likewise with power. Cruising around in the low 200w range is very easy for me, whereas keeping my power above 300w is quite challenging for the duration of a long ride, but sometimes do-able for up to 4 hours or so. In either case, though, if I’m doing a ride at a very low power or HR, I’ll know from the feel of it that I’m really not challenging my body’s endurance fitness much at all. Likewise, if I try to go out and hammer for 4-5 hours straight on my bike, but crumble as soon as I get to the top of the last hill at 4:30 into my ride, then I know that I’ve overshot and significantly increased the stress on my body while minimally increasing the fitness boost I might get from that ride. Especially when you’re trying to slowly but surely build your endurance, it’s better to have workouts that are moderately challenging. You should do workouts that take focus to complete, but don’t leave you in a hormonal or metabolic dump after the fact.

Along similar lines, I think that if you have a long progression of workouts that you want to use to gauge your aerobic fitness, I would be very curious to look at the ratio of power to average HR over those months or years of training. This is not something that I’ve yet done in any significant fashion yet, but I was planning to start experimenting with and looking into this. I would wager that one of the best indicators of aerobic fitness would be that for rides of a similar structure and conducted with similar RPE, would be to see your power/HR ratio go up. Namely, you can do more watts at a given HR or a fixed wattage at a lower HR. Ultimately, I would expect this to be maybe the best measure of aerobic fitness, or even just by definition what aerobic fitness means to us in real world measurements.

Should I use power, HR, or RPE for my threshold or interval workouts?

For higher intensity workouts, power or pace will matter much more than HR and RPE, because we’re specifically trying to increase the rate at which we can do work and go faster. Threshold or higher intensity efforts will be most effectively measured by power; HR and RPE will vary much more with respect to these efforts and won’t be a reliable indicator that we’re doing the kinds of efforts or the kind of intensity that we’re really aiming for. Unlike endurance workouts, power will often act to provide motivation and a lower limit of performance for a lot of higher intensity efforts.

Basically, if you’re trying to work on your threshold, you should have an intensity range equal to or just below your 30-45m peak power that you use to conduct your workout/efforts. Or if you’re doing aerobic capacity/VO2 max efforts, aim to be 10-25% above your threshold power. In both cases, ignore your HR unless you see it getting so high that you know it will become a limiting factor. For example, if you’re doing a threshold climbing effort in the heat of summer, a high HR will almost certainly indicate that even though the power you’re doing is well within your capabilities, probably at the HR required to deliver oxygen to your muscles and blood to your skin you won’t be able to maintain the effort for the goal length of the effort in question. Often, for anaerobic capacity efforts, I would say that you should have a good idea from past experience what power you should be capable of for various durations, but for these high-intensity efforts, the power you’re actually able to do for a given effort during a given workout will vary, so I would encourage you to pay about equal attention to power and RPE (i.e. how hard you’re pushing), and defer to RPE if there’s some decoupling of the two metrics relative to the norm. That is, both shoot for a goal power and aim for an effort level that you know will be appropriately challenging for the type of effort you’re doing and its timing in your training, both within the workout and within your training season.

As an example, let’s say that John has a 40 minute PR on a climb near him when he did a hill-climb there last year. During that effort, he averaged 300w and had good pacing so that his power was fairly consistently between 280 and 330 the whole time without a drop off towards the end (i.e. he had about a 300w average for any given quarter of the effort). If John’s doing a threshold workout, he should probably make an effort to average 280-300w for his 15 or 20 or 30m threshold efforts. If his HR is 5-10 beats high because it’s a hot day, then he should consider lowering his power so that his HR falls at or just below his highest average TT/hill-climb HR. If John’s doing mid-season 5x3m VO2 efforts with 10-12m recovery one day, then he should aim for probably 340-360w average for those efforts. Because the efforts are too short to have overheating and elevated HR be a serious issue, as long as he keeps track of drinking enough if it’s hot, then John can go crazy trying to keep his power at a challenging, but achievable level without paying much or any attention to his HR. Or, when John dials in his maximal 30s efforts by doing, say, 8x30s max effort with 3m recovery, he probably knows ahead of time what power he’ll see for each of those efforts, but depending on whether he had a tough workout a day or two beforehand, whether he’s doing these efforts uphill or on flat ground, whether he’s doing them 1h into his 2h ride, or 4h into his 5h ride, the power may well vary notably. But should he shoot for a power that he can’t actually do unless he’s totally fresh or be content with a power that’s well below what he’s capable of because his fitness is coming along and he’s well recovered from last weekend’s racing? Not by a long shot. If he’s doing maximal 30s efforts to improve his high-end power and tolerance to the stress of those efforts (neurological, chemical, and cardiovascular), then he should just go as hard as he can for those efforts, regardless of the power or HR numbers he sees on his computer. In all likelihood, since he’s done similar efforts recently in training and in races, he could probably guess within a very small margin of error ahead of time what power and HR numbers he’ll see, but again, they aren’t necessarily what matter. The stress to his body relative to what his body is capable of at the moment is what matters, so if anything RPE or perceived effort are really what matter for this workout.

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English Endurance is unique because our focus is on developing each athlete's individual strengths to help you achieve YOUR goals, whatever they may be. Nate will NEVER limit how many questions you can ask about training, nutrition, or racing.

About Coach Nate

Coach Nate is a former professional cyclist, endurance junkie, and tireless student of human physiology. He is notorious for his climbing and time-trialing prowess, and holds the record for the fasted time up Mt. Diablo on two wheels.